Pro Guiding Service - Stooges Revisted

The scheme wreaked of masochism: depart Seattle near midnight, drive five hours, nap an hour, climb 7000 vertical feet up Mt. Adams, ski the 3-3-3 Chutes, motor back home. But I argued eloquently about the elegance of speed, about accomplishing in 24 hours what most sloths needed 48 hours to do, and about living life fully with what the old Schlitz Beer ads called gusto. So I, the glutton for punishment, conned Curly and Moe, two Cascadian stooges (Powder October 1991) whose absence of brain cells made them perfect companions, into sampling the agony of gusto.

Now, at midnight, serious doubts about these ambitions arise as I watch the station wagon with a starboard lilt and a missing headlight sway into the parking lot, roll toward me, and stop. The window lowers and a blast of beer vapor slaps my face. Apparently my companions, who are AWOL from Alcoholics Anonymous, learned different lessons from the old Schlitz ads. Or perhaps the thought of packing two days of agony into 24 exquisite hours of pain has them prefunctioning to ensure they are in no condition to remember it.

"Sorry we're late," mumbles Moe, "I had to carry him away from the party." He gestures at the inanimate body in the back sprawled over a mattress of skis, snowboards, poles, ice axes, and crampons. Curly rolls over and stares at me with Stevie Wonder eyes while Moe presses a beer to his lips, guzzles, and belches. The smart thing to do is to avoid becoming a highway statistic. "Take your skis and go home," my conscience tells me. But smart and my name are two words rarely used in the same sentence, and I start arguing with Moe over which car to drive. Curly's car has gone around the odometer twice, is missing a headlight, has no dashboard lights, and is due for a major engine overhaul--which, I argue, makes it the ideal car for drunks to total. Moe says the headlight will get us pulled over, setting in motion an inevitable chain of events sure to land us in a dank county jail. Years of misdemeanoring have taught him the wisdom of breaking only one law at a time.

But wisdom holds no power over capitalism: I'm too tired to drive and no stinken drunk is crawling behind the wheel of my property. We throw my gear around the inanimate Curly and start rolling south, Moe at the helm, me prodding him with a Stun Gun whenever his head droops.

The early hours of morning crawl by as the hypnotic flashes of white highway lines leaden our lids. Then, when we are but a mile away from the lawless realm of Forest Service roads, calamity strikes. We awake from our highway-induced stupor by the blue and red flashes of the fuzz on our tail. Moe looks at me, "I told you so," blazing in his eyes.

"Did you know you were missing a headlight?" The cop asks putting his head next to the window and blinking back tears as beer fumes waft past.

"Yes sir." Moe says respectfully, "Got hit by a stone earlier tonight."

"What's he doing," the officer asks shining his flashlight on Curly who is not only nearly dead but nearly dead without a seat belt on. I'm adding up the charges: head light, seat belt, drinking and driving... and I haven't even gotten to the evils Moe has withheld from me.

"Sleeping sir. We're climbing Mt. Adams tomorrow and he's catching a few winks."

"Your car was swaying a little. Everything okay?"

"Tired, sir. We were just talking about switching drivers but my navigator here left his license at home."

"You awake?" the officer asks, looking at me.

"Yes sir."

"Don't be fools, switch now and get that headlight fixed ASAP."

He walks away and Moe and I share an incredulous look. Either the jails are booked up or the man is finishing his shift and has a little relaxation with Bambi in mind.

We drive on--now with the umbrella of the law sheltering our rolling beer can, and reach the trailhead at 4:30 a.m. I've got toothpicks prying my eyes open and have mastered Curly's impersonation of Stevie Wonder. I kill the engine, roll out the door, and am asleep when my face smacks the dust.

Two hours later we're not only awake, but ready to go--if you can call Curly's condition ready. Twice while urinating he has fallen face first into the bush he's been watering. Between those bushes and the 12,000-foot summit are 7000 vertical feet of elevation; I figure Curly's odds for success right up there with a slug's chances of crossing the Sahara.

Moe looks awful for different reasons. His snowboard hangs around his neck like a garish guitar, a yellow polypropylene rope forming the neck strap and the skeleton of the board's graphics laughing out at the world. His water bottle is buckled into one binding, a sack lunch occupies the other. Two fanny packs and a rumpled baseball cap stolen from a Skid-Row derelict complete the image. Curly studies Moe and mutters his first words of the trip, "You've skied seven volcanos this spring and this is the best system you've come up with?"

We start the climb and in moments the cold mountain air has exorcised the sleep from my eyes. For Curly it exorcises the liquor from his guts; he frequently takes to his knees and repents his sins into the red soil. Miraculously, he keeps rising and walking on. Eventually Curly's gut is empty and he is ascending strong and steady.

We climb above timberline following the streams draining the south side of Mt. Adams, then scramble up slopes of rust-colored volcanic talus. After two hours we reach snow. It's Saturday and the slopes of Suksdorf Ridge are littered with climbers and hikers taking the walk-up route to the second highest patch of ground in the Northwest. No one else carries skis and the throngs look at us in astonishment. "Idiots," they seem to say, "this is August."

Most of the visitors here tote ice axes and a few wear crampons but one foursome with monstrous packs sport a rope to protect themselves against nonexistent crevasses. They blaze a route 30 paces to the left of where the multitudes have kicked an impeccable stairway to heaven; the leader yells back to his struggling followers, "Jam the ice axe in deep, then haul up on it. It takes the strain off your legs."

Right, no sense in tiring the strongest muscles in the body.

Two college kids fly up the steps beside the mountaineers. They sport day packs, fabric boots, no ice axes, and the snow almost melts beneath their blazing feet. They and the mountaineers exchange looks of disdain, "Idiots," each group thinks of the other. Apparently we're not the only group competing for the bozo-of-the-day award.

We top the mountain at noon and eat a leisurely lunch. The southern slopes of the approach are already slushy, but the 3-3-3 Chutes, so named for the three parallel fingers of snow that drop 3000 vertical feet at a dead steady 30� angle, need longer to soften. We return to the false summit, the source of the chutes, and catnap in the sun. Finally we proclaim the snow perfect and ski southwest off the false summit on expansive convex slopes that curve under us as though we're skiing the skin of a monstrous basketball.

The basketball illusion ends abruptly when the slope funnels into a broad chute that drops with absolutely no interruptions in angle--every whisker of irregularity has been shaved away. The coward in me imagines the slope in icy conditions and sees a fallen skier rocketing toward the rock sphincter guarding the chute's exit. Ricocheting through the sphincter, a broken body is excreted onto the broad slopes below and tumbles another 1000 vertical-feet before disappearing into the little mouth of a tarn far below.

Today, however, much more than the razor of metal edges separates us from 4000 vertical feet of death--a forgiving veneer of velvety corn snow means our menagerie is in little danger of extinction. Moe the snowboarder, Curly the alpine skier, and I the pinhead, point our radically different tools downhill and paint tracks.

At this elevation, the teli skis take their toll; after squatting and jumping 40 times my heart fibrillates like a baby Alien jackhammering on my rib cage. The others have Aliens of their own to pacify so we leapfrog down, occasionally regrouping to rave about the skiing, the exposure, the scenery, and the interminable length of this chute. Occasionally Curly comments, "I don't remember skiing this slope last time we did Adams."

"That's because we didn't," Moe reminds him repeatedly. The tidbit, never sinks into Curly's oxygen-starved, alcohol-saturated brain.

Finally we reach the rock sphincter, thread our way through and spill out onto vast slopes of only slightly lower angle. My thighs are marinating in lactic acid and while I can get into my telemark squat, I can't get out of it. I switch over to parallel turns and the silky corn cleaves cleanly under the skinny sticks. I think back to the stares we received while humping these boards heavenward-- August or no, the bozos done good today.

At the tarn we follow the shoreline around to the source of the exit stream where we stop to admire the beauty of the descent line. "I just don't remember skiing that slope last time we were here," Curly puzzles. Moe and I ignore him, we are both struck by the mountain's personality--these slopes have as much in common with the side we ascended as Jimmy Carter does with his brother Billy. The processional zoo lies but a few miles distant but these slopes feel as though they just emerged from the Pleistocene. No zoo, just rock and ice. Lots of ice. Flanking us to the west the Avalanche Glacier, replete with gaping cracks that could devour 18-wheelers, tumbles off the peak and flows, untamed, downward. Ah, it's a sight for sore thighs.

We follow the natural drainage below our tarn, gliding over snow blackened by wind-blown volcanic dust. The skis swipe the snow clean leaving tracks of negative image. The snow vanishes in a field of boulders a full vertical mile below the summit and skis go back on the packs while I pontificate over the glories of gusto. At this moment Moe and Curly concur. After the 3.5-mile slog back to the car and with the anticipation of the five-hour drive to come, their allegiance has rubbed thin.

We throw our gear in the car and roll down the road. My body yearns for sleep but my mind is still high and working out the details for its next endorphine fix. "I've got it," I suddenly yell to my cohorts. "Next week, we hike 10 miles into Glacier Peak, climb 8000 vertical feet, then ski off either the Sitkum or Kennedy Glacier. Easy day trip." The silence of a pregnant pause is shattered by two beer bottles popping open.